Category: bicycling

Old Charlotte, meet New Charlotte

Old Charlotte met new Charlotte Thursday night. And in this case, “old” doesn’t necessarily refer to people’s ages.

Thursday night, I sat in on WFAE’s latest public conversation, this one on “One Charlotte or Many? A Neighborhood Perspective.“

Among the panelists was Tim Timmerman, a south Charlotte resident and founder of a group called South Mecklenburg Alliance for Responsible Taxpayers (SMART). He’s of the opinion that south Charlotte – the wedge-shaped pie slice with the city’s least crime, highest incomes, highest property values, highest education levels, etc. – is not getting its share of city resources while its property owners pay the lion’s share in property taxes. His part of the city would end up paying for a streetcar nobody wants, he said, and he’s tired of so much city money going to center city. South Charlotte has no voice, he said.

The other panelists – Diane Langevin, president of the Winterfield Neighborhood Association in east Charlotte, Vee Veca Torrence, president of the Thomasboro Neighborhood Association in west Charlotte, and City Manager Ron Carlee, only three weeks into the job – didn’t loudly denounce Timmerman.

But the audience sure did. Several audience members drew applause when they said Timmerman was being divisive. We are one city, they said. Stop being adversarial. We need a strong downtown and strong neighborhoods. We need not only a streetcar but a “spider web” of transit connections throughout the city. Two who drew applause were long-time Charlotte residents, one in her late 60s and a Charlotte native, the other a man who said he, too, lived in “the wedge,” yet he was delighted the city had spent time and attention on uptown. He recalled uptown Charlotte in the 1970s. It was dead, he said, and so much livelier now.

Several 20- and 30-something audience members rose to describe how much they value living in or near uptown and being able to walk and bicycle around the city. They urged better bicycle amenities. One young man said he had moved from Buffalo to Pineville and that he came to Charlotte because it had a transit line (and less snow). He’s looking to move closer to uptown. They talked about living in Villa Heights, Grier Heights, Echo Hills and Shamrock Gardens. Note: Those particular speakers were white, and the first two neighborhoods have been predominantly black for decades.

They don’t want to live in suburban south Charlotte, they said. “I would consider that a step down,” said one.

To a longtime Charlotte resident, this is an amazing sea change. For years, opinions such as Timmerman’s dominated the city’s discourse. And those neighborhoods of little houses and even less  cachet were where you lived until you could afford a new subdivision in south Charlotte.

Obviously, it’s not as though south Charlotte today lacks for people who want to live there. But the enthusiasm of the crowd for living as close to uptown as they could afford was inspiring. They want to live in “the city.” They want to bicycle and walk and take transit. This is a whole new interest group being added to the city conversation, alongside voices like Timmerman’s.

This is not the Charlotte I moved to 30-some years ago. And that, I think, is a wonderful thing.  
 

Major bike trail among city’s ‘zombie’ projects

The proposal to keep building Charlotte’s long-planned streetcar route is now officially a zombie. It’s among the living dead, or maybe in the “not dead – yet” category. But so is a $35 million proposal in which the city would have helped the county build out its greenway system, including a bike trail to run from UNC Charlotte to Pineville.

I wrote a piece for PlanCharlotte.org – the website I direct at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute – which was also picked up by The Charlotte Observer last Saturday. The PlanCharlotte piece is here: “Finding a lesson in city’s budget, streetcar impasse.“

Far less publicity has gone to the other community proposals that also were not adopted and, given electoral politics,  are likely to stay in cold storage until after the 2013 City Council elections. Here’s a link to a lot of details from the proposed Capital Improvement Program. The cross-county multi-use trail is one proposal whose demise (for now) has drawn sharp disappointment in some quarters. (Want to see a map? Here’s a link to City Manager Curt Walton’s PowerPoint, with the trail on page 15.) It’s also reproduced below.

Two students I know both said the trail and other projects were the sort that would attract young, educated people to Charlotte, or keep them here. That’s not scientific research, just anecdotal evidence to ponder.

Bike-sharing in Charlotte – soon?

A Charlotte City Council committee today takes up the question of what should happen next if Charlotte is to have (or not) a bike-sharing program. It also takes up an even more hot-potato topic: How to pay for the city’s road needs.

For those unfamiliar with the term bike-sharing, those programs have sprung up in cities all over the country, as well as in other countries. For a small fee – typically paid online – you can become a member or pay for a temporary membership. That gives you the ability to take a bicycle from a bike station, ride it for a certain number of hours and return it to another bike station

In its August meeting, the committee heard a presentation from Alta Bicycle Share, a consultant group that manages the Washington bike-sharing program known as Capital Bikeshare. (Photo courtesy of Capital Bikeshare, taken from the City of Charlotte’s website.) 

If you click on the link in the first sentence of this item, you’ll see that the committee agenda also holds a discussion on the sure-to-be-controversial topic of what revenue sources (read: tax or fee increase)
might be available to provide money for the Charlotte region’s huge transportation needs. The agenda says “provide detailed information on a variety of potential transportation revenue sources.”
The presentation will be a reprise of the recommendations from the Committee of 21, led by developer Ned Curran, which met in 2009 to look at the city’s “road needs.” It did not look at transit needs.  It did not look at “street” needs. None of which is to say that the city doesn’t need some work on its roads. It does. But in Mary’s Perfect World, we’d talk more about streets, which is what you have in a city, and less about “roads,” which are what you have between cities. And we’d mostly talk about “transportation” needs, which means looking at driving, transit, bicycling and walking, i.e., the Big Picture. We need to serve all those transportation forms.
The Committee of 21 looked at a gigantic list of possible funding, including such  Big City ideas as charging a fee for driving into uptown. It rejected most of those. For instance, congestion pricing (the downtown fee) can work well where residents have plenty of good options for transportation other than driving. Charlotte is not one of those places.
Why is the Committee of 21 presenting a reprise? I asked committee chair David Howard that very thing when I chanced to run into him Saturday at the UNC Charlotte Student Union. (I was walking around campus for exercise; he was waiting for his daughter to finish an educational program on campus.) He said he asked for it to be put on the agenda, because it’s a conversation the community needs to have.
The committee meets at 3:30 p.m. today in Room 280 of the Government Center.  

City pedaling and wilderness paddling

Bicycling and canoeing are kindred spirits in helping you explore your world, writes Joe Urban (a.k.a. Sam Newberg). In “Pedaling and Paddling in City and Wilderness,” Newberg writes about his experience in a canoe in the northern Minnesota Boundary Waters and its perhaps not-obvious relationship to bicycling through a city: 

“Just as the paddle is an “extension of your arm” in a canoe, the bicycle is an extension of your feet, enabling harmony and oneness with the street and buildings around you. As well, a canoe can cut almost silently through water, and a bicycle slices a quiet path through urbanity.”

 I shared the piece with a friend who’s a retired UNC Charlotte professor who used to bicycle to campus from East Charlotte and who goes on wilderness canoeing trips each summer. He replied:

“The essay comparing canoeing and bicycling strikes a very strong chord with me.  I would rather paddle in the Boundary Waters than be anywhere else on earth, except bicycling to UNCC.  The two experiences are so similar in my basal reptilian brain that I dream about them as one thing: flying over the landscape a few feet above the surface with no visible means of support.  Jung would have fun with that.”

Our mayor in Spandex?

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, at his regular news briefing Thursday, mentioned that he’s been teaching his kids, 6 and 4, to ride bikes and said he went out and bought himself a road bike, the kind with toe clips that he’s still learning how to use.

The last few days, he said, “I’ve gone out at 5:30 in the morning and gone down to the Little Sugar Creek Greenway.” He talked about wanting to make the city friendlier to bicycling.

All of which leaves the obvious question, which yours truly was the only journalist in the room willing to ask: “So, are you wearing Spandex?”

Foxx: “I’m not answering that.”

Which I think means he must be.

So, dear readers, if anyone wants to volunteer to be a citizen journalist and go down on the greenway at – as my friend Brenda would say, “O-dark-thirty” – and try for a mayoral Spandex sighting, please let me know what you discover.

Sound off to NCDOT about biking, walking,

If you have thoughts – and I bet you do – about what the North Carolina Department of Transportation could do better to help bicyclists and pedestrians, here’s a chance to give them your opinions.

Take a Bike-Ped survey for NCDOT. It’s quick, and who knows, they may actually use it. Even if they don’t, it might feel better to get stuff off your chest. Survey link sent courtesy of Dick Winters, the Safe Routes to Schools coordinator for Mecklenburg County Public Health.

Why don’t more women bicycle?

My recent recounting of the 4.2-mile, 80-minute walk to work (“A Morning Walk”) brought a Twitter response from @JamesWillamor: You could make it in 15 to 20 minutes or so on a bicycle.

I tried to explain to him about the problems of riding on Providence Road, and the problems of having to wear office garb at the office and tried a delicate mention (especially difficult with the 140-character nature of Twitter) of the issue of profuse sweat from biking up that long long Morehead Street hill.

He persisted: Plenty of office garb on bicyclists in Europe and Asia. “Humidity,” I replied. He said there’s plenty of humidity in Japan and China.

But maybe there’s more to my reluctance than the logistical problems of trying to bicycle in nice clothes, or in a disinclination to being killed by bicycling on Providence Road. (I have imagined elaborate and circuitous routes through the meandering heart of Myers Park but there’s no way to avoid riding on some parts of Providence and either busy Morehead or busy Stonewall.)

Could my reluctance be, in part, because I’m female?

I got an e-mail today that originated with transportation planner John Cock (correction, no longer with The Lawrence Group, now with Alta Planning), notifying people of a free Webinar (register here) from the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals. The topic: “Writing Women Back Into Bicycling: Changing Transportation Culture to Encourage More Women to Cycle.” The blurb: “Some say that transportation culture will change when more women are cycling. What’s the key to making that change happen?”

Indeed, what would help me reconsider? My quick list:

First, safe bike lanes wide enough so I didn’t feel I’d put my life in danger.

Second, a chain guard to keep the grease from getting onto my office clothes. Because who wants to have to carry good office garb in a backpack? That adds even more weight to a pack where you’ve already had to stash your office shoes. Plus in a pack, your good clothes would wrinkle.

Third, a good place to shower at the office. I can walk and still be presentable if it’s not 80 degrees outside. No way I could bicycle without showering. (Technically, because of where I work, I could shower at the Dowd Y. But that’s not a generic solution for all women.)